Rob Hammerton, music educator etc.

This Much Is Not Uncertain

So. It’s been a week…

(And what a week it’s been.)

…since the White House actually, literally changed hands.

For a lot of people, it’s been a very hard week – partly because of the flurry of executive orders out of the Oval Office that threaten to uproot a lot of lives. And it’s been a hard week partly because, for many of us, we had no idea that it would get this bad, this fast.

But it’s been a hard week also because of the uncertainty.

Right after the election, I immediately identified the source of my stress: the uncertainty was towering. What would the new Current Occupant of the Oval Office be like as an actual President, not merely as a candidate? And in the time between then and Inauguration Day, the uncertainty did not diminish.

And now that we know what it’s like to have a Vulgar Talking Yam in the White House and acting as President, if not in a terribly presidential way (as we have come to define such a term in the last couple of hundred years) … amazingly, the uncertainty has not in any way diminished.

How will Mexico respond to his behavior? How about China? NATO countries? Will our theoretical allies still want to be friends with us when all this is over?

How will he respond to an actual crisis? Say, a natural disaster within the US, or a terrorist attack upon its citizens? Will he make things better or worse?

Still hard to say; although there’s more and more evidence to suggest that whatever the exact details of whatever crisis may befall, the response will be somewhere between semantically inappropriate and literally catastrophic.

And this is the world in which we live, now.

And people are already getting hurt.

I don’t, in this case, mean the people who wonder if they’ll soon be deported, or how soon their right to marry will be taken away, for example. I don’t mean, in this case, the people who already do and surely will continue to face discrimination and taunts and threats and actual bodily harm because of present or future policies (or just because of the awful behavior of nitwits who like to hurt people) that have to do with what they look like, or what deity they worship, or which gender their loving instincts gravitate toward.

Although I do think about those people, specifically people I know who fit into those categories, Every. Single. Day.

Here, I mean that people are getting hurt when they just try to keep up with this stuff; when they try to make sense of the nonsensical; when they try to metaphorically swim upstream and make headway in the face of this toxic torrent of awful. When they try to come to terms with the fact that what has been unthinkable for 240 years has become a feature, not a bug.

I include myself in this particular category of people getting hurt, although I’m a straight white guy, so I’m not right in the crosshairs this very moment. Weirdly enough, I haven’t lost sleep. (I know this because I’m no more of an early-morning person than I was three months ago.)

But I do spend a great deal of time marinating in politics and current affairs – because I did before the election, and before the campaigns, and in fact for the last about thirteen years I’ve been especially politically aware and vocal. So it’s kinda my thing.

Which means, in the last week especially, I’ve been positively seething a lot of the time.

It can’t be healthy. It can’t be good for me; I know this.

But I don’t feel like I can unplug; because I’ll miss something … and there’s hardly a thing out there that is unimportant.

“Don’t feel as if you have to keep track of everything,” folks say, “because there are tons of people out there, and not everybody has to watch everything. Division of labor, and all that.”

Easy for you to say. I care – I want to care – about everything that’s going on, and going wrong.

“Ignore the Tweets,” folks say, “because they’re just smokescreens for the truly terrible things that are happening. Don’t get distracted.”

“Okay,” I reply, “but those Tweets communicate things about our current chief executive, or his views, or about basic truths even, that should not be swept under the rug, that should not be let go, because if you let them go, they’ll just get repeated and repeated and he won’t learn anything and the lies he tells will start to become accepted as truths because that’s how it works…!”

(Remember the flap about the VP-elect’s reception at that performance of “Hamilton”? Cheeto Mussolini’s tweet brought up an important issue, even as it distracted us from … from something … something much more pressing, something to do with … damn it, that’s my point – we can’t even remember what the hell it was, even though at the time it was frickin’ DefCon 1. So much has happened since then that it’s practically lost to antiquity.)

This morning, I figured something out, though.

It wasn’t that I should unplug for a day, or two, or a week, for my own state of mind.

If anything, I should focus harder.

Just on different things, from time to time.

The day after the election, I came to the horrifying realization that a lot of people had voted for Orange Muppet Hitler. Certainly enough, by our arcane electoral rules, to elect someone whose behavior I would not have tolerated for more than thirty seconds in my middle-school music classroom.

“If you voted for Trump,” said one of my favorite political commentators, “you’re either a racist and a misogynist, or you’re OK with racism and misogyny.” My response (to my iPod, from which her podcast was coming), was, “yeah, and you just had your basest instincts toward treating people badly – either for a purpose or for your own self-satisfaction! – validated.

And there were tons more of those people out there than I had thought, more than I had realized before … than I had wanted to know were really out there.

Now, I didn’t immediately look at the world, the morning of November 9, and suddenly observe that the drivers were more impolite (I live in Massachusetts; it’s hard to tell) … that people in cash register lines were more impatient … that people greeted each other less warmly, now that the President-Elect was someone with all the manners of a bull after the china shop. I didn’t suddenly, immediately feel like the sun was a little dimmer in the sky, or that food tasted not quite as good, now.

But I had conversations with people (who weren’t even in the groups that will soon feel oppressed and frankly mistreated by their own government) who did feel that way. And the world did seem different, somehow off-kilter, even though it looked exactly the same as it had the day before.

It’s one thing to be disappointed that your guy (or in this case, your woman) didn’t win an election, and that the fellow who did win is just not your cup of tea.

This is another thing, though. A whole huge substantive hell of a different thing.

A lot of people took this one especially hard – including me – because it wasn’t just a question of whose policies or politics made more sense, or would help more people, or would get more things done that made sense to get done. For those of us who didn’t vote for the Short-Fingered Vulgarian, it was because … well, it was because we felt strongly enough that he was an awful person and a miserable role model; it was at a much more “core” level than “his personality doesn’t lend itself to sober, considered governance” and “Russia may have a blackmail-oriented hold on the guy”.

I violated my usual rule of “don’t call people names”. I made up unflattering nicknames for him (irony, I know … since all we heard for a year and a half was “Crooked Hillary” and “Lying Ted” and “Little Marco”), but felt like those nicknames were much less playground mockery and much more, uh, journalism.

I endeavored not to be pulled down to his level; and sometimes failed. So I maybe didn’t feel too good about that. And then, I found out that the noble philosophy – “when they go low, we go high” – or, as a certain famous carpenter once suggested, “turn the other cheek” – didn’t work anyway.

It felt like the very concept of civility, of being decent to one another, had taken a hit. And that treating your fellow man like crap was now the de facto, unspoken policy of the United States government.

And in the first week of the new Administration, it has felt increasingly like treating your fellow man like crap has become the actual policy of the government, thanks largely to the pack of leaders and potential leaders whose sole concern in life appears to be profiting off the suffering of others. Whose moral compass always points squarely in their own direction.

I’m not sure where we go from here … since in theory there will be 207 more weeks until the next inauguration … but the possibilities are staggering, and not in a good way.

What, exactly, to do?

Plenty!!, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators showed the very day after the Inauguration. Like a boxer getting up and regrouping after being knocked to the canvas during the first minute of a heavyweight fight … people and organizations are standing back up and shaking the cobwebs out of their heads and deciding on strategies to use, to win this fight – now that it’s clear that this fight is going to go all twelve rounds.

But this is not about that, at least not in this blog post.

This is, instead, about one small thing that I (we) can do, which may help to preserve one fundamental thing that can not, or certainly should not, be legislated out of existence with the mere passing of a bill or the signing of an executive order:

Being decent to each other. Not treating people like crap. Showing support for people before they’ve shown support for us.

So I’m actively, purposefully, paying attention to a few little things, when they happen. And all these have happened in the last week:

I’ve actively paid attention when I’ve had a chance to let a driver merge into my lane, and when I’ve been the beneficiary. And made sure to smile and wave, in either case.

I’ve actively paid attention to the moments when I’ve had a chance to smile at a cashier, to hold a door for somebody, to spare a cheerful “good morning!” for a custodian who’s already been at work long before my day began.

I’ve actively paid attention to – and reveled in – the church choir rehearsal moments that have featured good spirits and belly laughs and oh by the way music preparation. Particularly those moments wherein choir members have cheerfully made jokes back and forth, not at each other, but with each other – with affection and camaraderie and a sense of pulling on the oars in the same direction, and to the same cadence.

Because there are plenty of tough times ahead, thanks to the policies of people (one in particular, but there are many characters in this insidious drama) who think only of themselves and their own personal and political gain, who have no idea about true human decency because they don’t traffick in it nearly enough to be good at it.

So while we’re trying desperately to hold their feet to the fire, to hold them back from doing the things they would dearly love to do to people and not so much for them … and while we’re trying gamely to swim upstream in the toxic tide … we cannot lose sight of opportunities (responsibilities) to make individual lives around us better, even with the smallest gestures, even with the least earth-shaking appreciations.

The good people of this earth have to stay that way – together. If we get sucked into feeling that the “do unto others, then split” adage of 1970s t-shirts is the new normal, then we’re really up the creek.

Resist. Reject.

(But as Abraham Lincoln said to Bill and Ted … be excellent to each other.)